The
Stockholm syndrome is a psychological state in which the victims of a
kidnapping, or persons detained against their free will, develop an emotional
attachment, a bond of interdependence with their captors.This is enhanced when the captive is placed in a life-threatening
situation and is then spared.The
relief that results from the removal of the threat generates intense feelings of
gratitude which, combined with the fear, makes the victim reluctant subsequently
to cooperate with those seeking to prosecute the oppressor.

The
defining characteristic of Stockholm syndrome is the tendency to react to
threatening circumstances not with the usual fight-or-flight response, but by
"freezing," as some animals do by playing dead in order to fool
predators. Stockholm syndrome is a position of passivity and acquiescence that
works in a similar way as a strategy for survival.

This
situation was summed up well by one of the hostages of the TWA Flight 847
hi-jack in June 1985: “They weren’t bad people.They let me eat, they let me sleep, they gave me my life.”

In
August 1973, a 32 year old named Jan-Erik Olsson, having escaped from prison,
attempted to rob a Stockholm bank.His
attempt went awry and, in the best Hollywood tradition, he held four employees
hostage in a vault for six days.Despite
Olsson’s threats to kill them, the four bank workers bonded so thoroughly with
him that they refused to denounce him and, indeed, criticized their rescuers.

It
is now accepted that there are a number of situations where people, held in
thrall by forces they feel helpless to resist, seek to appease those forces and
work with them. This is no more than a basic survival instinct.It applies, for example, to “battered women” who display a strange
need to be loyal to their husbands or partners and often resist appeals to
escape or take other defensive action.

Both
hostages and battered women share psychological and emotional responses to their
victimizers. Hostages are overwhelmingly grateful to their captors for giving
them life; battered women are inordinately grateful to their abusers for giving
them love. Each focuses on the victimizer's kindnesses not their acts of
brutality. Both feel fear, as well as love, compassion and empathy toward
someone who has shown them any kindness. Such acts of kindness help to
ease the emotional distress that has been created and sets the stage for
emotional dependency. Battered women may assume that the abuser is a good
man whose actions stem from problems that she can help him solve.

Women
Against Domestic Violence (WADV) states that: "battering is a pattern of
behavior used to establish power and control over another person through fear
and intimidation, often including the threat or use of violence. Battering
happens when one person believes they are entitled to control another. Assault,
battering and domestic violence are crimes.

"Battering
may include emotional abuse, economic abuse, sexual abuse, using children,
threats, using male privilege, intimidation, isolation, and a variety of other
behaviors used to maintain fear, intimidation and power. In all cultures, the
perpetrators are most commonly the men of the family. Women are most commonly
the victims of violence. Elder and child abuse are also prevalent.

"Acts
of domestic violence generally fall into one or more of the following
categories:

"Physical
Battering - The abuser’s physical attacks or aggressive behavior can range
from bruising to murder. It often begins with what is excused as trivial
contacts which escalate into more frequent and serious attacks. Sexual Abuse -
Physical attack by the abuser is often accompanied by, or culminates in, sexual
violence wherein the woman is forced to have sexual intercourse with her abuser
or take part in unwanted sexual activity.

"Psychological
Battering -The abuser’s psychological or mental violence can include constant
verbal abuse, harassment, excessive possessiveness, isolating the woman from
friends and family, deprivation of physical and economic resources, and
destruction of personal property. Battering escalates. It often begins with
behaviors like threats, name calling, violence in her presence (such as punching
a fist through a wall), and/or damage to objects or pets. It may escalate to
restraining, pushing, slapping, and/or pinching. The battering may include
punching, kicking, biting, sexual assault, tripping, throwing. Finally, it may
become life-threatening with serious behaviors such as choking, breaking bones,
or the use of weapons."

Patricia
(Patty) Hearst was a millionaire’s daughter, granddaughter of the American
publishing baron William Randolph Hearst, who was kidnapped and tortured by a
group called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).

In
February 1974 she was abducted from her Berkeley, California apartment and
extortionate demands from the SLA led to donations by the Hearst family of six
million dollars-worth of food to the poor of the San Francisco Bay Area.
But of, or from, Miss Hearst there was no word.

In
April 1974, however, she was photographed wielding an assault rifle during the
course of a robbery of the Sunset branch of the Hibernia Bank.

Patty
Hearst

Later
communications from her revealed that she had changed her name to Tania
and was committed to the goals of the SLA. A warrant was issued for her arrest
and in September 1975 she was arrested in an apartment with other SLA
members.

At
her trial, which started in 1976, Hearst claimed she had been locked blindfolded
in a closet and physically and sexually abused, which caused her to become a
convert to the SLA, A clear analogy exists here between the case of
Patty Hearst and the bonding that had occurred in the Stockholm bank incident of
two years earlier, albeit that this was a rather more extreme example of the
syndrome.

(b) Elizabeth Smart

Elizabeth
Ann Smart was kidnapped in June 2002 from her home in Salt Lake City,
Utah. She was five months short of her 15th birthday.

Nine
months after her abduction Elizabeth was found with two homeless adults, Brian
David Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee, in Sandy, Utah, when they were
stopped by police. At that time she refused to reveal her true identity,
nor had she earlier run for help when the opportunity had been available to her.
Mitchell had earlier done handyman work at the Smart house.

Mitchell

Barzee

The
case inevitably provoked comparison with Patty Hearst and evoked references to
the Stockholm syndrome, although the generally expressed opinion of her family
and friends was that she must have been brainwashed by her captors.

Mitchell's
lawyer has told a television
station that his client considers the 15-year-old his wife and "still loves
her". He added that he did not consider Elizabeth's disappearance a kidnapping, but a
"call from God."

"He
wanted me to tell the world that she is his wife, and he still loves her and
knows that she still loves him, that no harm came to her during their
relationship and the adventure that went on,"

Mitchell,
an excommunicated Mormon and self-style prophet, wrote a rambling manifesto last
year espousing the virtues of polygamy. The Mormon church has long distanced
itself from polygamy and excommunicates those who practice it. His lawyersuggested that giving a light sentence to his client could send a signal to
kidnappers that they should keep their captives alive.

"As
a doctor, it's amazing to me that you can become so brainwashed that you
identify with your captor," grandfather Charles Smart said.During
her time with her abductors, "Elizabeth had the chance of escaping. One day
she was completely by herself, but she didn't try to run away," he added. He
did not elaborate on circumstances in which the girl was left alone.

It
applies also to the reluctance or refusal to escape from political or economic
bondage.In the area of racial,
ethnic or geographical slavery, the oppressed usually appear blind to the
reality of their enslavement after long periods (sometimes generations) of
subjugation to political and economic forces.They may complain or agitate, but seem strangely incapable of
comprehending the precise nature of their situation in order to escape.

Slavery,
it has been said, has been the fate of almost everyone during the whole history of human
political activity. If you think that you are not caught up in some form of
slavery (in particular, slavery to implanted beliefs) then you are either
captivated and blinded by your situation and the deceit of your oppressors, or
you have had a life of miraculous good luck. If the latter then you must feel
quite lonely and frustrated at not being able to convey the truth of their
situation to others.”

This
may be a time to recall the wisdom of Thomas Szasz:

"Every
act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's
self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own
self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or
important, cannot learn at all.

“It
is so difficult to face the sacrifice of ideas to which we have adapted our
lives. But it may become possible, even easy, if we understand that it is our
human ability to self-sacrifice that creates the food of wisdom and a healthy
mind. Self-sacrifice (of belief to better information) is the fuel of our
intellectual progress.”

It
could be postulated that the willingness of many people to accept the abuse of
goods and service providers is merely a variant on the Stockholm syndrome, akin
to that of battered wives.In order
to justify bad choices, people will often rationalize and defend their
decisions.Mobile telephone
companies, TV satellite suppliers, internet service providers . . . no matter
how much we may complain directly to them, we tend to defend them when speaking
to others.To denounce them would
be to admit to our own insufficiency.

Dr.
Helen Smith, in her TCS essay on the book by David Frum and Richard Perle, An
End to Evil: (Random House, 2004) writes:

“.
. . some Americans seem to believe that if we can "feel our enemies'
pain," then we will be on the path to enlightenment and peace. This belief
could not be further from the truth. In my private practice, I don't work with
terrorists but I do work with violent people. I used to believe (as many of my
colleagues still do) that empathizing with my patients and increasing their
self-esteem would help them on the path to self-actualization.

“Of
course, for some anxiety-ridden patients who need faith in themselves, the
technique of empathy and support works. However, for
those patients with serious violent tendencies, just the opposite is true.
With those patients, I've found that setting clear boundaries and making
judgments about their immoral behavior works like a charm.

“Those patients who threatened me backed down only when I got up
in their face and told them forcefully to stop -- the slightest hint of
fear or intimidation (or sympathy!) on my part was met with increased
threats.In the real world of private practice,
confronting real murderers, I learned to act in ways that were different from
what I had been taught in graduate school.

“Unfortunately,
there are still those in the ivory tower who have not learned this valuable
lesson. They continue to believe that to humanize and to empathize with violent
students, professors, and terrorists is the only way to treat those who wish to
do them harm. In fact, however, the old saw "give them an inch and they'll
take a mile" applies. Without clear boundaries, and a sense of
consequences, their behavior will spiral out of control until they injure
themselves and others.”

“In our attempt to be
overly-tolerant and empathetic, we start to identify too much with the enemy
(very much like those suffering from Stockholm
syndrome)
and start to dehumanize
the victims of terror.”

Thomas
Strentz spend 20 years as a Supervisory Special Agent with the FBI's Behavioral
Science Unit. He was a former marine, an expert in hostage situations,
negotiation and survival, and stress management in correctional
environments. Also, as a crime scene assessor and profiler, he conducted
worldwide research for the FBI on terrorist activities, and was responsible for
much of the original research on the Stockholm syndrome.

In
1980 he commented that "the victim's need to survive is stronger than his
impulse to hat the person who has created his dilemma." The victim
comes to see the captor as a "good guy", even a saviour. This
situation occurs in response to four specific conditions:

1.
A person threatens to kill another and is perceived as having the capability to
do so.

2.
The other cannot escape, so her or his life depends on the threatening person.

3.
The threatened person is isolated from outsiders to that the only other
perspective available to him or her is that of the threatening person.

4. The
threatening person is perceived as showing some degree of kindness to the one
being threatened.

For example,
battered women assume that the abuser is a good man whose actions stem from
problems that she can help him solve. Hostages are overwhelmingly grateful
to terrorists for permitting them to live; they focus on the captors'
kindnesses, not their acts of brutality.

*Based on details provided by the site of Women Helping Battered Women (WHBW)